Back to the Purple

 After that second foray, I will admit to being a bit overwhelmed. How could I possibly do everything that happened in that adventure justice?! Especially with the death of a beloved PC?

And, of course, I have been working on so much other content, including sourcebooks, modules, and a couple of my own games. A lot of those projects are ongoing on my other blog .

But I have really enjoyed my adventures across the Purple Islands. And it was never my intent to abandon this project.  So now that I finally have that long, brutal, strange adventure on paper, I will get back to it.

Going forward, I have learned a few lessons to make life easier.

1. Use Paper:  digital notes slowed me down writing what happened, and then again when I turn them into a blog entry I had to flip back and forth between applications on my phone. I originally thought I could copy paste information, but I ended up not doing that anyway.  I now have a dedicated notebook for future adventures.

2. Constrain Dungeons: The grotto of the eight men was a necessary evil. The encounter in the book said eight eight hit die eight men monsters living in a grotto. And the dice perversely said that I needed to get the necronomicon as I happens to be in a haxware one was located. It was almost miraculously pat. If I hadn't created a huge dungeon to house those beasts they would have slaughtered my poor 4th level party. In the future, I need to constrain dungeons to know more than a dozen rooms. 22 was way too big.

3. Break it Down:. When something gets long and involved like a dungeon brawl, I have to be willing to break the day of adventures into discreet packages and spread them over multiple blog posts. Initially, I wanted to put everything in one entry because I thought that I would slack off and stop playing if a couple of hours of gaming then took me several weeks of entries to share. But now that I've had an actual experience with getting overwhelmed by the scope of a crawl, I realized I would have gotten more done had I been willing to stretch it out. Probably would make it easier to read, too.

4. Experiment with Media: I was a voiceover professional for several years before my body simply rebelled and I became allergic to almost every living thing. I have finally found a combination of medication, treatments, exercises, and diet that means that I no longer live with a sore throat 24/7. It might be time to start using my pipes again. Starting off slow with a few podcasts episodes of Crawling the Purple Isles might be a good way to woodshed my skills again... While being faster to produce.

Day 11: Grotto of the Ape-Men - Second Incursion

 Content Warning: Allusions to torture and & Sacrifice, injury to eyes, blood & gore. R-Rated for sure.

Grotto of the Ape-Men, Room 22

Day 11, First Watch

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Neela shuffled carefully down the winding passage into the cavern. The others a few yards behind her. She reminded herself not to hold her breath. No easy task. Her months living as a slave had taught her a lot about stealth, and listening. Among the things she had learned: letting fear control your body made you vulnerable. It helped to remember all the things her father taught her about listening to the stones around her. Feeling vibration and airflow.

If she paused and tuned into the stone she could hear and feel much. And let go of much. For a moment she was a child again, on the trip her father took her to the emerald and alexandrite mine in the lower marshlands of Dumar. Two glorious weeks of walking the dykes, fishing in the rivers, and listening to the soft tapping of jewel-miner's hammers as she stood in the mines with her father and he taught her to hear the spirits of the stone. "The old Dwarf" the miners called him in a mix of amusement and awe. So attuned to the stones he seemed to have the same knack for reading the rocks of the stoutfolk. It was a joyous time in her childhood. And as she focused back on the world around her, she caught herself smiling in spite of herself. At first a nostalgic grin, and then a huntresses grin... she had heard them. The mutter of men, the grunt of an ape, the creak of leather. Subtle vibrations in the stone suggested a number to her... although that was a pure intuition that would be fatal to trust.

She held her hand in a signal they had arranged last night. Crossed fingers - an ambush ahead. Then a turn of her wrist told them "I will scout ahead."

Shuttering her lantern to its lowest she crept low to the edge of the chamber, and peered into the gloom. Only it wasn't perfect gloom this time. To the right she could see a collection of men in ratty clothing and leathers, faces pained with bizarre markings crouched around a lantern of their own, muttering to one another. So there were the human cultists.

She slipped back and used an array of hand-signals and one-word whispers to fill her allies in on what she had seen. A plan was formed swiftly and silently; they had anticipated guards or an ambush in the first chamber, and were not disappointed.